UnderMINE

The American Lawn, AI, and What We Have Been Conditioned to Unsee

The American lawn.

40 million acres. 2 trillion gallons of water a year. The largest irrigated crop in the country — more than corn, wheat, and fruit trees combined.

Is that a lot? What is a lot? The press tells us U.S. AI data centers consume too much — roughly 17.5 billion gallons of water in 2023.

Here is the inconvenient truth.

The lawn uses 100 times more water than AI.

Lawns at 2 trillion are good and AI at 17.5 billion is bad? Where is the logic? And water is just half of it. We mow it on Saturdays — burning 800 million gallons of gas a year. Americans spill 17 million gallons just refueling their equipment — more than was spilled by the Exxon Valdez.

In 2021 I carved the carbon symbol into 35 feet of Zoysia turfgrass at Lawndale Art Center — Carbon by the Yard — to make visible what those 800 million gallons deprive us of. In 2022 I replaced a section of that same turf with native plants, living soil, and deep roots — CARBONsink — to show what the same ground could store instead. Carbon. Water. Life.

That is how I know how ridiculously easy it is to change.

The lawn is not the problem. What we have made it into is the problem. Forty million acres of chemically dependent monoculture sitting on top of some of the most populated land in the country. Land that could be absorbing rainwater, cooling the air, sequestering carbon, feeding pollinators, restoring the biodiversity we have been losing for a century.

For every one percent increase in organic matter per acre, soil can hold an additional 20,000 gallons of water. Native plant roots reach eight to fourteen feet deep — sequestering carbon like an upside down rainforest. The coastal prairie that Houston sits on once soaked up everything the sky sent down. We replaced it with turf. Harvey showed us what that costs.

But the ecological argument, as urgent as it is, is not the most powerful thing the lawn could do.

The most powerful thing is this: lawns exist in the largest population centers in the world. They are the daily interface between modern humanity and the living world. If we change what happens on that interface — in front yards, street medians, corporate campuses, school grounds — we change how millions of people understand their relationship to the planet. That is a social transformation. The ripple effects are incalculable.

Which brings me back to AI.

The comparison between lawn water use and AI water use is not meant to let either one off the hook. It is meant to show that we are already wasting at a scale that dwarfs what we are alarmed about — and that the solution to both problems might be the same solution. AI saves us time. It makes us better. What if it also helps us see what we have been conditioned not to see?

What if the lawn became part of the answer to AI’s water problem? Native landscapes absorb and store water in the ground. Deep roots recharge aquifers. Living soil filters and holds what falls from the sky. More than 160 new AI data centers have been built across the U.S. in the past three years — many of them in water-scarce regions. A Meta data center in Newton County, Georgia uses 500,000 gallons a day — 10% of the entire county’s water supply.

What if the landscapes surrounding those data centers were living systems instead of turf? What if regenerative landscaping — on the scale of cities — could recharge the aquifers that AI is draining?

I don’t know if that is possible. But I know that the first step is to stop treating the lawn as decoration and start treating it as a living system connected to everything.

Writer and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer observed that in the wild, the solution is often found near the problem. The remedy grows where the wound is. The lawn uses 100 times more water than AI — and the lawn is also the solution to AI’s water crisis. The same 40 million acres. The same ground. The problem and the answer occupying the same space.

Tomorrow the gallery floor disappears under 600 square feet of sod.

I thought about attending the opening barefoot. Then I thought about the chemicals that must have been applied to grow this perfect mono-crop of sod. I won’t be barefoot on it.

That is the point. We have made the most abundant surface on the planet — 40 million acres of it — something you cannot safely stand on in your bare feet. Something that poisons the people who maintain it. Something that sheds the rain, kills the insects, and heats the ground it covers.

And we call it a lawn. We call it beautiful. We mow it on Saturdays.

underMINE is 600 square feet of that lawn, brought inside. What we have been conditioned to unsee — you walk by it every day — now you are standing on it.

Now imagine it differently.

AI changes instantly when it receives better information. Society takes forever — even when the difference is 100 times more gallons of water. However for society, baby steps are how it starts. One gallery floor. One front yard. One school ground. One corporate campus.

What if AI saves us enough time that we have time to garden? To grow our own food? To tend the land instead of manage it against itself? Think of the ripple effects of that idea.

The lawn has enormous potential.

The first step is to stop underMINEing. Start seeing.

Nantucket’s GMO Mice on 60 Minutes: The Sexiest Fix Is Usually the Wrong One

A tick. A mouse. A gene. What could go wrong?

I WATCHED AND THOUGHT PLEASE ASK THE QUESTION

I watched 60 Minutes this Sunday. They were on Nantucket Island, where scientists are genetically modifying white-footed mice to be resistant to the bacteria that causes Lyme disease. The idea is that if the mice can't carry the pathogen, the ticks that feed on them can't spread it to humans.

I have four grandchildren. We spend a lot of time outside. Lyme disease is no longer someone else's problem.

On the surface, it sounds like the most reasonable thing in the world. Lyme disease is brutal. It is under-diagnosed, under-treated, and life-altering for the people who get it and can't get rid of it. I understand why this research exists. I understand the urgency. And I understand the seduction of the technological fix. Technology is the sexy fix.

But I kept sitting with the question that nobody on the broadcast asked.

Are we walking in with a solution before we've finished asking the question?

What does the system already know?

I wondered how they got there. I did a bit of research.

The whole crisis on that island traces back to a single decision in 1926, when the community voted to bring two female deer to the island to keep a lone buck company. The deer population grew. The ticks that feed on deer grew with it. The rest followed. One small, well-intentioned act rippled into a century of consequences.

There is another layer to this. People on Nantucket were already calling it the Nantucket flu long before scientists had a name for it. The island was ground zero before anyone understood what was spreading. The bacterium has been here for sixty thousand years. What changed was the balance.

 

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

Here is what I have learned — not in a laboratory, but in gardens, in living sculptures I have spent years building and tending and learning from: nature is not a problem to be solved. It is a relationship to be understood. And when we skip the understanding and go straight to the intervention, the intervention tends to produce consequences that take years — sometimes decades — to fully reveal themselves.

We have a word for it now. Unintended consequences. It has become so common a phrase we stopped hearing it.

It is time to hear it again.

 

PULLING THE THREAD

When you release a genetically modified organism into a wild ecosystem, you are not making one change. You are pulling a single thread in a fabric whose full complexity you cannot see — because no one can. The relationships between species in a functioning ecosystem are not linear. They are not predictable in the way a software update is predictable. They branch and loop and feed back on themselves across seasons and generations and multiple layers of soil.

The white-footed mouse is not just a Lyme vector. It is food. It is seed disperser. It is prey for foxes, owls, hawks, and snakes. It is a piece of an intricate puzzle that the island's food web has been assembling for centuries. When you genetically alter a species and release it into that web, you are not just changing what that species does to a tick. You are changing what that species does to everything it touches — and everything those things touch in turn.

We do not know what that is yet. We genuinely do not know.

That uncertainty alone should slow us down.

The scientists on Nantucket are brilliant at what they do. They just aren't reading Grandin. They aren't reading Carson. Different silo. The genome cares.

 

I LEARNED FROM TEMPLE GRANDIN

The clearest warning comes not from an environmentalist but from Temple Grandin.

She points to a Russian experiment that began in the 1950s. A geneticist named Belyaev set out to breed foxes for a single trait — tameness. Within a few generations the foxes were calmer. But simultaneously, without anyone selecting for them, other changes appeared: floppy ears, curled tails, white facial blazes, spotted coats. Nobody chose those traits. They came along for the ride. The genome, it turns out, does not honor our categories. Change one thing and the effects are linked to things you cannot predict.

Then there is what happened to the chickens. The broiler industry selected hard for large breast muscles and fast growth. Before the 1990s, what followed had never been seen. Roosters began attacking hens — violently, injuring and killing them. The normal courtship behavior had simply vanished somewhere in the selection process, and something dangerous had taken its place. It spread from one strain to nearly all strains within just a few years. Nobody planned it. Grandin writes that nobody knows exactly why it happened. Commercial broad-breasted turkeys were pushed so far in the same direction that they can no longer breed naturally at commercial scale. The entire industrial turkey industry now depends on artificial insemination. One trait selected. An entire behavior system dismantled.

 

RACHEL CARSON WARNED US

Ask any Texan over fifty where the horned toads went. My brother and I used to find them in the desert. They were so gentle they would sit still in your hands. Then fire ants arrived — stowaways in the soil used as ships' ballast, introduced through the Port of Mobile in the 1930s. At first they were a manageable problem. Native ant species were already fighting a low intensity war against them. The system was handling it. Then the chemical industry and the USDA decided to make fire ant eradication a program. They aerially sprayed DDT and other pesticides across the South — killing not just fire ants but the native ant species that had been competing with them. Rachel Carson wrote about it in Silent Spring. The pesticides didn't eradicate the fire ants. They toughened them. With their natural competitors eliminated, fire ants flourished and spread to more states than ever. The USDA quietly ended the program in the early 1970s, admitting the ant mounds were not a serious obstacle to farming after all. The intervention created the crisis it claimed to be solving.

Carson went further. The fire ant program was not born from evidence of actual damage. It was born from manufactured hysteria — and a pesticide industry that needed a market. The fire ant became the villain because someone needed to sell the cure.

Fire ants outcompeted and displaced the native harvester ants that horned lizards depend on for food. The horned lizard population collapsed across the state within decades. Nobody released fire ants to kill horned toads. The effects rippled through the food web in a direction no one predicted, erasing a creature that had been part of this landscape for centuries.

A staple of my childhood. Gone.

 

SEEING IN SYSTEMS

What I keep thinking about, watching the Nantucket story, is this: before the genetic modification, did anyone seriously study what is out of balance? Could the answer be as simple as returning a predator? Foxes eat mice. Owls eat mice.

The science backs this up in ways that should stop the experiment cold and give us all hope and faith in the natural world. Ironically, 60 Minutes already told this story. In 2020 they covered the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park. When wolves returned in 1995, coyote populations dropped by half — by as much as 80 percent in areas with established wolf packs. Fox populations recovered. The cascade moved through the entire ecosystem in ways still being studied thirty years later. One predator returned. The system began remembering.

That same chain applies to Nantucket. Researchers studying the spread of Lyme disease across the Northeast found that increases over the past three decades are frequently uncorrelated with deer abundance — and instead coincide with the decline of the red fox, pushed out of its territory by the expansion of coyotes. Where coyotes dominate, foxes disappear. Where foxes disappear, mice multiply. Where mice multiply, infected ticks follow. The Cary Institute's Richard Ostfeld puts it plainly: certain predators protect our health. Manage the environment so healthy predator populations can exist, and Lyme disease rates fall.

Nobody needed a genetics lab for that insight. The system lives it.

Digging deeper — Opossums. Nearly two decades of field research finds they are one of the most effective natural checks on tick populations — not because anyone designed them for it, but because of how they live. They groom obsessively, killing ticks that land on them. And because ticks are drawn to opossums the way they are drawn to mice, the ticks that choose an opossum instead of a mouse never acquire the Lyme bacteria — they die on the wrong host. Opossum populations have been declining across the Northeast as habitat shrinks and road mortality rises. Now that is a lead story!

Hawks, owls, kestrels. The predators that keep mouse populations in check — reducing the host population through biology rather than modification. The question is not whether they could help. The question is whether we have given them the habitat they need to do it.

None of these approaches require us to change the genome of a wild animal and release it into a living system we cannot fully predict.

White-footed mice don't just carry Lyme disease. They live underground — in burrows dug by other animals, in root cavities, in the hollow spaces the island's soil has accumulated over centuries. When they vacate those spaces, other species move in — including native bumblebees that depend on these same underground spaces to nest and reproduce. What happens when the DNA left behind in those burrows belongs to a genetically modified animal? Nobody has studied it. We have to ask.

 

In my work, I have learned to sit still long enough for the living world to forget I am there. It is what I mean when I write about seeing in systems — the discipline of looking before intervening. What I see when I do that is not disorder. It is a conversation already underway. Relationships I didn't design, couldn't have predicted, and would have disrupted if I had reached in too fast.

The white-footed mouse has been in relationship with that island's food web for a very long time. The tick with the mouse. The Lyme bacteria with the tick. Something changed — in the landscape, in the predator population, in the human encroachment on the habitat — that allowed the disease to expand. The system is showing us where the imbalance is.

Genetically modifying the mouse answers a symptom. Restoring the system addresses the cause.

 

THE SAFER PATH

A tick. A mouse. A gene. What could go wrong? Everything.

That science is cool. It is sexy. It has to wait. There is no going back once you have rewritten a genome and released it into the wild. The safer path is simpler and older — give nature what it needs to find its own balance. Remove whatever is preventing the predators from returning. Restore what the island once knew.

Not sexy. But beautiful in a way sexy will never be.

The system remembers. We just have to get out of its way.

 

How I Got Here

In the mid-nineties, my husband was diagnosed with diabetes. We had both grown up in small towns, but differently. My mother was a schoolteacher — we ate whole foods, but they came from cans. My husband grew up closer to the source: farms, soil, food that still remembered where it came from. When the doctors handed us the food pyramid and told us to follow it, we were starting from different places. But we arrived at the same question together. The grains at the base, the carbohydrates they called foundation — the more we followed their guidance, the more insulin he needed. The glucose numbers didn’t lie. And slowly, reluctantly, we understood that the people giving us this advice weren’t confused. The pharmaceutical companies, the medical institutions, the government agencies propping up industrial grain and monoculture and seed patents — they knew. It was a hard thing to accept. But the numbers made it undeniable. So we stopped following and started looking for ourselves.

The questions led to farmers markets, to conversations with people who were still raising food the old way. A regenerative farmer selling grass-fed beef at a market stand told me something I didn’t expect: that grass-fed beef carries the same beneficial omega fats as wild-caught salmon. I had been eating salmon every week for years — it was what the doctors recommended, the one healthy protein we were told to trust. But it had started to feel wrong to me. How could the only truly healthy protein come from cold water fish? How would humans have survived inland, far from any ocean, for thousands of years? That question had haunted me without an answer. The farmer gave me one. The land the animal lived on was in the food. The health of the soil was in the body. Suddenly everything shifted. And there was something else: if grass-fed land proteins could replace our dependence on wild-caught fish, the pressure on the ocean lifts too. Fix agriculture on the table and you begin to fix it in the water. The systems are not separate. They never were.

That connection — between the land and what it produces and what it does inside us — changed the way I see everything. It wasn’t just about food. It was about a system. A living system that industrial civilization had interrupted, and that we were all paying for without knowing it. I wasn’t angry so much as awake. Once I saw it I couldn’t unsee it.

A few years later I came across Allan Savory’s TED talk on desertification and the role of ruminants in restoring degraded land. Savory showed how the movement of grazing animals — their consumption, their waste, their hooves breaking the crust of dry earth — was the mechanism that had built the world’s grasslands over millennia. But it wasn’t just the land they were building. Their waste alone feeds an entire chain of life: microbes, flies, dung beetles, birds, and everything up from there. Remove the animals and the whole web unravels. Return them, managed holistically, and the prairie comes back — not just the grass, but every creature that depends on it. Carbon returns to the soil. Water returns to the ground. The climate steadies.

I had been following a thread from my husband’s body to a farmer’s pasture to the roots of the coastal prairie, and I didn’t fully know it until that moment. Humans are animals. We are part of this system. We dispersed seeds and moved nutrients long before we decided we were separate from the land and above it. We are not managers of nature. We are participants in it — or we are supposed to be.

This understanding became the ground my art grows from. It led first to Endangered Knowledge: the Soul of Humus — a work about what we have forgotten and what the soil still holds. And from there, inevitably, to Symbiosis — where curiosity installed the first microbial soil, planted the first native plants, and became something you could walk through.

SUNRISE — ROSEATE SPOONBILLS The Timmons building second floor.

Written in 2025. Posted late —

SUNDOWN - ROSEATE SPOONBILLS

7’ x 9’4” — watercolor, pastels, and ink on collaged Stonehenge paper

Image by Jake Eshelman

At the turn of the century, women’s fashion nearly caused the extinction of the Roseate Spoonbill. Feathers for hats. By 1895 the spoonbill no longer bred in Texas.

In 1923 the National Audubon Society began leasing a chain of islands along the Texas coast. Slowly, the birds came back. Today approximately 3,000 pairs nest along the Texas coast.

That is the story in this piece. Not a decorative bird. A bird that almost wasn’t here — and is.

The Roseate Spoonbills are finished and in storage until the upper levels at 3100 Timmons Lane are repainted. When they go up they will join the Sandhill Cranes already installed on the first floor.

Two comeback stories. One building. An audience of nine to five.

SUNRISE - ROSEATE SPOONBILLS

7’ x 9’4” — watercolor, pastels, and ink on collaged Stonehenge paper

Image by Jake Eshelman

In my studio

Details

It Takes a Village to Reshape a World

On gratitude, collaboration, and the first growing season of Sequel.

 It takes a village to raise a child. It takes a village to reshape society. This is something I have come to know — through the making of four living sculptures and now Sequel, my fifth, and through the extraordinary people who have shown up to witness it grow.

“What does urban land become when we stop managing it against itself?”

Among them are Bea Bellorin https://www.beatrizbellorin.com/ — artist, videographer, and mom — and Jake Eshelman https://jakeeshelman.com/ — photographer, co-owner of Feast Day Studio, and professional artist. Two people with full, demanding lives who still show up, every solstice, every equinox, with their tripods and their patience — and document the change.

The name Sequel carries two meanings, braided together. This is the fifth in a series of living sculptures — each one a continuation of the last, each rooted in the same question at its heart. And it is a sequel to something larger: to the colonial landscape practices that made grass a monoculture, soil a substrate, and nature a problem to be controlled.

Sequel is what comes after. What repair — chosen and tended — actually looks like.

I am incredibly grateful, and incredibly excited. Soon I will reveal the video from the first growing season — the one Bea has been quietly building, frame by frame, across four visits and four thresholds of light. I cannot wait for you to see what she has seen.

Jake’s photo documentation will also be exhibited as part of a piece in my upcoming two-person show at Throughline Art Collective in May — more on that piece in a future post.

None of this work happens alone. Thank you, Bea and Jake. Thank you to everyone who has walked through this space, asked questions, shared seeds, or simply let the wildness be.

The village is the work. The work is the village.

One Year Old, Two Feet Tall and Already Working.

Last year I planted two American Fringe Trees — Grancy Greybeard — one on each side of the stone walking path that takes you into Sequel. They are a year old. Two feet tall. They are babies. And they are already teaching me something.

The Eastern tree is thriving. It gets full sun.

The eastern tree is thriving. It gets full sun. The western tree is the smallest — shaded by other small plants that block its access to full sun. It should eventually outgrow them.

The western tree is the smallest and is shaded by other small plants that block its access to full sun. It should eventually outgrow them.

I chose them deliberately, the way I choose every element in my living sculptures. In Symbiosis at Lawndale, every plant was a decision about relationship — who would it feed, what would it host, how would it move nutrients and carbon through the system. Sequel is the same conversation, carried forward. The fringe trees at its threshold are not decorative. They are a proposition.

The walkway features the two one-year-old trees, barely visible, standing 10 feet away from the center.

Chionanthus virginicus grows naturally at the edges — along woody draws and stream banks, in the transitional zones where forest gives way to coastal prairie. That is exactly where I placed them: flanking the stone path, at the threshold. You pass between them to enter the work. The living sculpture begins before you know it has begun.

The fringe tree does its most important work in the margins — the places most overlooked, most degraded, most in need of rebuilding. That is where Sequel lives too.

Come April through June the white fringed blooms open — long, thread-like petals cascading like an old man’s beard in a coastal breeze. For native bees and butterflies this is a critical nectar window early in the season when little else is offering. The fringe tree is a larval host for three sphinx moth species. A host plant is not ornamental. It is food infrastructure. Female trees produce dark blue olive-like fruits in late summer — high-fat fuel for migrating songbirds. Their dense multi-stemmed structure creates cover and nesting opportunities for birds. And their roots hold the clay soil at Sequel’s entrance, moving water downward — the same function I have been studying since I first understood how roots cool this planet and absorb what Houston cannot stop flooding with.

A close-up of the trees soft, airy beard.

A threshold is a sculpture.

When I carved Carbon by the Yard into Lawndale’s turf, the gesture was simple: carve a shape, let the grass grow around it. The relief emerged from contrast. What was taken away revealed what was possible.

Carbon By The Yard - Lawndale 2021

The two fringe trees at Sequel’s entrance work the same way. They mark the passage from the manicured urban world outside into the living, breathing, intentionally ecological world within. They are the frame. They are also the argument — that two feet of native species, one year old, already threading itself into the insect food web, is doing more ecological work than turf and non-natives could do in a decade.

They are a year old. In twenty years they will be twenty feet tall — cascading white each April, fruiting each September, hosting moths, sheltering songbirds, holding the ground. Sequel will have grown up around them.

That is the whole conversation.

Deeper Than That

Living Sculpture · Chapter One · March 2026

What looks like a garden is never just a garden. It is a negotiation — between time and patience, between what was planted by intention and what arrived on the wind.

There is an eighty-year-old brick wall bordering the driveway at this site. For decades it has been clothed in Asian ivy — a non-native groundcover brought to American landscapes for its tidy, persistent green. It does its job beautifully. It is, in the language of horticulture, well-behaved.

Passiflora returning — new growth reaching through the established jasmine.

But well-behaved is not the same as alive. Not in the way an ecosystem is alive — humming, interconnected, feeding the soil and the sky and the creatures that move between them.

A few years ago the work began to ask more of that wall.

Passiflora returning — new growth reaching through the established ivy.

The characteristic palmate leaves of Passiflora foetida — Stinking Passionflower, unmistakable in early spring.

The conventional path would have been removal — strip the ivy, expose the bare brick, replant with natives, endure the years of awkward adolescence while the new plants found their footing. I know that story. I’ve lived it.

But stripping the ivy meant exposing bare brick for years and losing a plant that was holding the soil, filtering rain, cooling the brick. There had to be another way in.

Horseherb in flower — what looks modest is quietly essential, blooming for months and feeding the smallest native bees.

So instead of replacing the ivy, the question became: what could grow through it?

Not starting over. Beginning from where things already were.

A vine threading through established hedge structure — using what was already there.

Two species of passionvine were planted directly into the base of the jasmine. Bee balm and horseherb were added in the pockets of soil at the wall’s edge. The passionvines did something elegant — they used the jasmine as a trellis. They climbed its established woody structure, threading upward without anything new to build or maintain. When the vines went dormant over winter, the ivy held the wall — green, living, intact. The non-native became, in its own way, useful.

Lobed leaves in morning light — the living architecture of succession at work.

It is not only a metaphor for everything. It is practical.

The butterflies arrived. The bees found it. The wall, at eighty years old, is still becoming something.

Native ecosystems don’t clear-cut and replant. They layer. Succession is slow, relentless, generous — one organism creating conditions for the next. This project works with that logic rather than against it. Every passionvine root threading deeper beneath this wall is pulling carbon downward, slowing rainwater, building soil. The organic matter accumulating at the base filters what the sky sends down.

The ivy, by contrast, requires weekly grooming with gas-powered equipment to stay tidy. The native community asks for nothing. And gives back everything.

That is what a living sculpture does. It does not arrive finished. It moves toward something — through seasons, through years, through the patient logic of ecology working at its own pace.

And what it is working toward is deeper than anything that could have been designed.

May 5th — still spring. The passionvine has taken over the near half of the wall. Look closely toward the back and you can see the darker texture of the Asian ivy still holding its ground.

THE DAY THE WIND DREW

An Introduction

Some invitations arrive like weather — unexpected, and carrying something with them.

When Holly Josey reached out asking if I would curate her exhibition for FotoFest, I said yes before I fully understood why. That is, I think, the only honest way to say yes. You feel the pull of something before you can name it. You trust the tug.

What I did know was this: my own work has long been in conversation with the natural world. Gust, a body of work I’ve been developing for years, is rooted in wind — in its invisibility, its insistence, the way it shapes everything it touches without ever being seen directly. So when Holly described pens suspended from tree branches, left to draw whatever the wind drew, something in me recognized it immediately. Not as a concept. As a kinship.

We began with a studio visit. She laid out everything — paintings, photographs, the tender evidence of a practice built on deep looking. What unfolded over those hours was something I’ve come to treasure in the work of curating: the slow revelation of an artist’s inner world. Holly’s relationship with the natural world isn’t borrowed or decorative. It is structural. It holds everything up.

Getting to know a new artist who listens this carefully to nature — who is willing to hand the pen to the wind and mean it — lifts something in me. It reminds me why I make work, why I say yes, why paying close attention is never wasted.

Saying yes, I’ve learned, is its own form of letting go.

THE DAY THE WIND DREW

Curator’s Statement

There are two questions underneath all of these works — what does it mean to let go? And what does nature already know? Holly Josey answers these questions with open hands.

Holly Josey’s exhibition The Day the Wind Drew began with a simple act: pens suspended from tree branches, left to move however the wind moved them. Over hours and days, the marks accumulated — not chosen, not corrected, just received. The original work is intimate — 84 inches, on paper — but the wind is not intimate. It is vast, so the wind’s drawing was photographed and printed at monumental scale, filling a 10.5 by 18-foot wall. What remains is a kind of frozen breath, a single moment pulled from an endless series of compositions.

As a curator who works as both an eco-artist and a citizen scientist, I am drawn to what is happening in this work on a deeper level. We are living in a moment when it is dawning on us — slowly, and not without resistance — that the natural world’s intelligence has been unfolding since long before we arrived. The wind has its own logic. The tree has its own memory. Natural systems have been perceiving, connecting, and evolving for far longer than we have. To make art with them, rather than simply from or of them, feels urgent right now. It feels necessary.

It calls to mind something Marcel Duchamp understood a long time ago — that an artist does not have to be the one holding the brush at the final stroke. When his large glass work was damaged in transit, shattering into a web of cracks, Duchamp did not mourn it. He called it finally finished. The accident had completed it. Earlier still, he had let threads fall from a height and fixed their landing exactly as they landed — chance crystallized into form. He was making room for the world to collaborate.

Josey does the same, only her collaborators are alive. The tree. The wind. Time itself. These are not abstractions — they are presences in the room with you as you look. The erratic lines on her paper are evidence of a relationship, a conversation carried on without words between the viewer and the elements. This is what any artist or citizen scientist recognizes: that watching carefully, without forcing a conclusion, is itself a form of knowledge. That the most beautiful things happen at the fringes, in the borders, in the unexpected moments when you let go.

This is what connects everything in this exhibition. Not a style, not a medium, but a willingness to not know exactly what will happen — and to begin anyway. To stay open to risk. To let the work breathe. To learn, as natural systems have always learned, by paying close attention to what the world is already doing.

Cindee Travis Klement

www.cindeeklement.com

From Dusk to Dawn- Four works on paper

Written in 2025. Posted late —

I was contacted to create two small artworks for an office building in Houston getting an updated look — 3100 Timmons Lane.

When I saw the space I saw an opportunity. An audience coming and going nine to five with no connection to the natural world right outside their door. A five-story lobby with open wall space and nothing to draw your eye there.

I proposed something bigger than what was asked. Two works, two stories tall — Sandhill cranes in a wetland on the first floor, Roseate spoonbills in the trees on the second. Two successful conservation stories, stacked one above the other, in a building full of people who might never otherwise encounter them.

The developer said yes.

3100 Timmons Lane

One of the 7’ X 9’ recessed spaces for artwork.

But before any of that — I had to figure out how to make them.

This commission was the first time I worked with a process that has since become central to my practice. I start with a drawing. Then I tear it apart — deconstructing the image into shapes. I reassemble those shapes on a second sheet of paper, building a relief. Once the relief is built I brush on large swaths of watercolor, then use a garden sprayer to manipulate the color — letting it run into the crevasses of the relief, redrawing the image through movement and gravity. Then pastels for the detail marks. The drawing finds itself again, but changed. Looser. More alive.

That process led directly to Unfolding Hope — the body of work I created for the Houston Endowment Jones Artist Award. But it started here, in a studio sketch for an office building on Timmons Lane, trying to figure out how to put a Sandhill crane in a five-story lobby.

My presentation to the developer.

A early sketch

The next step involved deconstructing the drawing by tearing it into various shapes. After that, I can create a relief by reassembling these shapes on a second sheet of paper..

Why Sandhill cranes?

In the early 1900s relentless hunting pushed them to the brink of extinction. Only 12 mating pairs remained. What brought them back was wetland restoration and habitat protection — initiated by hunters who understood what they were losing. Today Sandhill cranes are the most plentiful crane species in the world.

That is the story I wanted in that lobby. Not a decorative bird. A comeback. Evidence that when humans choose to act as conservationists, the results can be staggering.

The Sandhill cranes are installed. The Roseate spoonbills are finished and in storage until the upper levels are repainted.

When the cranes went up the developer told me something I didn’t expect — the building became a community. Tenants were talking to each other about the birds. He leased his largest spaces the next month.

That is what I hoped for. Not decoration. A reminder — for people who spend their days inside — that nature matters and we feel its pull even through art.

The two finished pieces — Sunrise: Sandhill Cranes and Sundown: Sandhill Cranes — can be seen in my 2025 portfolio. Come see them. Better yet — come to the studio

Then comes the color.

SUNDOWN CRANES

7” X 9”4”

watercolor, pastels, ink on collaged Stonehenge paper.

Image by R. Wells

SUNRISE CRANES

7” X 9”4”

watercolor, pastels, ink on collaged Stonehenge paper.

Image by R. Wells